In the business world, situations frequently arise in which a physical meeting between geographically separated parties would be appropriate, but the expenses associated with bringing those parties together are too high to make such a meeting practical. In these situations, teleconferencing provides a convenient, low-cost way for those parties to conduct a meeting via telephone. Teleconferencing may also be useful in situations in which the number of participants in the meeting exceeds the available meeting space or in which gathering all of the participants in a single location is inefficient or undesirable for some reason.
There are many commercial audio conference services currently available. Typically, a person who has been invited to participate in a teleconference will be given a telephone number for connecting to a designated audio conference system and an access code or password to gain access to the teleconference. Accordingly, the participant first dials the telephone number and then, typically in response to a prompt, dials the access code/password to join in the conference without requiring operator intervention. Often, the audio conference service phone number and access code/password will be contained in links included in a meeting invitation comprising a text message, such as an email message or calendar entry, which may be viewed by the participant on a communications device, such as a mobile communications device (“MCD”).
Currently, a user can easily dial the phone number by clicking on the link in the text message that contains the phone number; however, the user is required manually to enter the access code/password for the particular conference call when so prompted. Accordingly, the user must either have written down or memorized the code prior to initiating the call to the service or must, when prompted, switch the active screen from a Phone User Interface (“PUI”) to the application that contains the access code/password, write down or memorize it, and switch back to the PUI to manually dial the access code/password.